


what goes up

by eugyne (AreteNike)



Series: The Law of Gravity [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Altean Lance (Voltron), Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Growing Up, keith and lance are brothers au, minor character death (it's keith's mom), their parents are basically qpps, well both are half alien at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-21 17:58:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12462927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AreteNike/pseuds/eugyne
Summary: All Mark Kogane has left is his infant son and the empty sky.(This series can be read in any order.)





	what goes up

**Author's Note:**

> HAPPY BIRTHDAY KEITH i wrote a thing about your dad
> 
> the fics in this series can be read in any order, but you do kinda need to read them all to get the full story. hope you enjoy! <3

Mark Kogane is sobbing on the floor.

Rai is gone, this time for good; he wishes he weren't so sure of that but he watched her ship go up in flames, come crashing back down out of the sky--he's sure. Keith, little Keith, hasn't stopped wailing since, but Mark can't bring himself to do better.

Instead he sits on the floor, Keith in his arms, and cracks open. Shatters apart.

He makes no move to pull the pieces back together, even when his tears run dry; he just stays there, curled up around his infant son. He doesn't know how long it's been but he's got no drive to get up or move at all. Keith has cried himself out, too, but he still lets out a whimper now and then.

"I know, baby, I know," Mark whispers into the soft hair atop his head. "I know. I know. I know."

Keith squirms against his chest, and Mark shifts to accommodate; it's then that a distinctive smell wafts up to him, and with it a realization: Rai is gone, but if Mark doesn't get his shit together, Keith will be too. Keith, who relies on him for everything; Keith, who's been crying and needy for hours.

"Shit," he whispers, and wraps one arm more firmly around his son; he pushes himself up with the other, leaning heavily against the wall as he staggers to his feet. "Shit, baby, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

He takes out the half-full bottle in the fridge and sticks it in the microwave one-handed, and changes Keith's diaper with shaking hands as the microwave hums behind him.

The microwave is done before he is, and beeps insistently at him as he washes his hands.

"I _know_ ," he hisses at it.

Keith is half asleep when Mark picks him back up and offers the bottle to him, but after the first taste he sucks eagerly. Mark lets out a long sigh of relief, and sinks down onto the couch, carefully.

"S'just you an' me, now, kiddo," he murmurs. "Just you 'n' me."

He falls asleep there with Keith on his chest.

It's five days before he thinks to turn on the radio, five long, awful days, in which he spends countless hours staring at walls and at the drawn curtains and is unaware of the passage of time until Keith makes a noise and he remembers all over again that his son needs at the very least a semi-functioning father.

When he does turn on the radio, Rai's crash is already news and gone, only to be mentioned in passing--there's been another one in Florida and the hosts like to compare the two in the vaguest terms. Mark doesn't give a shit about any Florida crash but he wonders what they found of Rai, if anything, and then the thought makes him nauseous and he has to close his eyes and bury his face in Keith's soft hair and breathe deeply until it goes away.

It's four more days before he goes back to work--a garage is no place for an infant but he has no choice, and if Keith will sleep on the ratty old couch in the breakroom, he'll take that stroke of luck and run with it.

It's another three days before he makes a cross from scrap wood and takes it out to the bluff, and hammers it into the sand so that it overlooks the canyon. "Rai" is painted on it, along with a very small, smudged handprint.

"Your mother liked it here," Mark tells his son.

Keith looks up at him very seriously and pats a hand against his jaw.

"She did. I liked it, too."

Keith burbles some nonsense at him, and for the first time in almost two weeks, Mark cracks a smile.

"Ya think so?" he says. Keith blows a raspberry. "Yeah, baby, me too."

In a month, Keith reaches up to him and says, clear as anything, "Papa!" And Mark swings him up into his arms with tears in his eyes and feels like a human being again instead of a shell.

When Keith is approaching one year old and walkin' like a champ, Mark takes him to the little park in town; it's the only place with real grass for miles around. There's a woman there, with a little boy in a stroller, and a man harassing her.

"Heard about you," he's saying.

"Fuck off," she says in turn.

"Tell me abou' the aliens," the man leers, getting into her face with a too-wide grin and a bottle of shit whisky in hand, and Mark decides he's had enough of watching.

"Hey!" He shouts across the park--it's a very small park. "She tol' ya to fuck off."

The man staggers back a step, wavering, sizing him up. Apparently he decides Mark isn't worth the trouble, because he settles for flipping the bird and weaving off down the sidewalk. Mark hoists Keith up onto his hip and approaches the woman at an easy pace.

"Y'alright?" he asks.

"I'm fine," she says, stiff. She's short and at least as pale as Keith is but her son's just this side of a brown that could be mistaken for tanned, if he weren't a baby--she's got an accent he can't place, too. She fusses with the kid's clothes and doesn't look at Mark.

"What was that guy on about? Aliens?" He's not the sort to pry, but hell, if he's met one maybe she has too. She huffs, though, and finally meets his eyes.

"What, you don't recognize me?" she snaps. Up close she looks as weary as Mark feels on his worst days. "The crazy lady from Florida that blamed her kid on aliens?" She gestures sharply toward her son, who giggles and reaches toward her fingers. "It was all _over_ the news after the crash."

There are a few things Mark could say to that, like "I wasn't paying attention to much back then," or "I don't have a TV," but what he does say is, "Didja hear about the crash out in the desert here, just before?"

She squints at him. "Yeah, what about it."

He nods down to Keith. "That was his mother." He says it fast, before he can think too much about it, about Rai; worst case is she won't believe him.

Best case, as her face drops open in shock, is he finds a kindred soul.

They set their sons down in the sandbox, in the corner of the park that passes for a playground, and sit on the swings to watch them play. Her name is Mirana--her son’s is Lance--and her heels don't quite touch the ground though the swings are sized for children and Mark's got one leg bent up and the other stretched out in front of him; she pushes herself forward and back just slightly with the ball of one foot while she talks.

"I was abducted," she says, "just like in a movie. I think he was from the past, too--I think we time traveled."

Mark just nods. Rai taught him that anything is possible.

"He was a prince." She squints up at the sky. "I think he took me because he was bored. Rebellious. He never told me why."

"Rai wasn't royalty, but she was a rebel," Mark says. "She was hidin' from some big empire."

Mirana smiles crookedly. "I hope they weren't enemies."

"Can't've been, if y'all time traveled," Mark reasons.

"I guess so."

They fall silent; in the sandbox, Keith reaches over with one chubby hand and drops a tiny fistful of sand into Lance's lap, and Lance giggles.

Mark and Mirana meet up a few times that week, and for the next several. At first it's for their own sake, but soon it's as much for the boys, too. They get on like a house afire.

When Mark finds out Mirana works a night shift at the only 24-hour convenience store in town he offers to babysit Lance at night. She watches Keith during the day in turn.

In six months they throw up their hands and move in together, into the third floor of a three-family house, with Mirana in one tiny room and Mark in another tiny room and the boys together in the biggest room, and one bathroom for the four of them. It's cramped. Noisy. Even this quiet little town is louder than the desert is at night, and sometimes Mark even misses the way the wind would whistle through the gap in the roof over the bathroom out at the shack and leave little piles of sand in the bathtub for him to find in the morning, but here he doesn't have to look up at the empty sky so much.

Besides, Keith and Lance both are li'l terrors on their own, but together they keep each other entertained. Both are still working their way towards sentences but they delight in saying each other's names, "Lan" and "Keef" over and over and over.

Lance starts calling Mark "Papa" too and he doesn't have the heart to stop him.

"I don't want to be loved, anymore," Mirana tells him one evening, when the boys are asleep and she doesn't have to go to work for another hour, and they're sitting in the kitchen with a coupla beers and a crackling radio. "Romantically. I don't need that. I just want to be respected."

"I respect you," says Mark. He doesn't love her the way he loved Rai, but he cares. He cares plenty, and Lance is as much his son as Keith is.

They get married because it's easier that way, just before they register the boys for preschool. They never share a bed or want to.

Mirana gets a better job. Mark stays at the garage. The boys grow up. They call themselves twins though Lance is three months older; Lance has more friends, and Keith has playground enemies but better grades. Lance drags Keith along to all his playdates, and Keith helps Lance with his homework, and Mark is so proud it hurts sometimes. He sees in the way Mirana smiles at them that she is too.

They don't talk about Rai or Alfor anymore. They agreed it was better to keep that secret. They don't lie, though; Lance knows Mark isn't his father by blood, and Keith knows Mirana didn't bear him. They just don't know a thing about their other parents.

Even so, Mark has caught both boys looking up at the night sky sometimes, like something in them knows they came from the stars. He takes them "camping" out in the desert--they sleep in the shack--and he pretends he's not uncomfortable as he points out all the constellations he knows. Soon they know more than he does.

When Mirana suggests signing them up for flight school he almost feels betrayed.

"I ain't sendin' my boys up there!" he yells. He's never yelled at Mirana before, not once. "I ain't gonna give 'em the skills to _kill themselves!_ "

"You know they won't be up there by themselves, Mark," she responds, always with her quiet fire. "Better they learn the right way rather than try it themselves."

"They'd never."

"You really believe that?"

There's a junkyard not that far away where the military school in the desert leaves its trash, everything that isn't classified. He doesn't believe two curious boys too smart for their own good couldn't make something run again.

Mirana wins the argument.

Halfway between the boys' fifteenth birthdays--because neither birthday party will do--she signs them up. Mark hates knowing they're up there in the sky, the sky that stole Rai from him, but it's an aging wound and both boys take to it like nothing else. And when they go up, they always come back down safe.

"We're gonna go to space someday," he hears Lance telling Keith, one evening after they've come back safe and grinning. "You and me, right?"

"Right," says Keith.

They graduate high school when they're one, four months shy of eighteen, and Mark hangs the photo of his sons in their caps and gowns over the kitchen table so he and Mirana can see it when the boys are gone down to the Garrison.

Lance calls regularly. Keith calls sometimes. Mark and Mirana put them on speaker and treasure every word.

When the Kerberos mission goes missing--when Keith's closest friend outside his brother goes missing, he calls, in the middle of the day when Mirana's at work but Mark is off. He says hardly anything but stays on the line for hours, and Mark puts him on speaker and rambles as he works around the house, for the noise of it.

Sometimes people go up, and they never come back down.

But the thing about loss is, life will go on without you.

"It's hard," says Keith, when Mark tells him so.

"I know it is," says Mark. "But I'm here. I'll always be here."

One week later Lance calls too late at night and tells them Keith is gone. Vanished without a word with everything he owns and Shiro's hoverbike.

"Is he home?" Lance begs. "Tell me he went home. He won't answer his phone."

"He isn't here," Mirana says, eventually, because Mark can't speak. Keith can handle himself, but that won't stop them from worrying, even when he texts Mirana to say he's safe.

Mark barely sleeps that night. In the morning he calls off from work, and drives out into the desert. The Garrison isn't far away and the old shack is even less so.

There are footprints in the sand on the porch, the trail of a finger through the dust on the rocking chair. The door sticks worse than it used to.

When Mark sees the lump on the couch, curled in a tattered old blanket, his heart squeezes but does not shatter. He's had to pick up the pieces here before, near twenty years ago; there are pieces still left behind here, he thinks, tucked between the couch cushions, wedged in the gap in the bathroom ceiling where the sand comes in. There's a piece in the boy curled up on that couch and there always will be.

Right now, though, his son needs his father.

Keith isn't asleep, but he hardly even glances up when Mark nudges his way onto the couch, just scoots over to make room. Mark runs his hand through Keith's hair; it's not as soft as it was when they last lived here, but he doesn't mind.

"They're liars," Keith says when he's ready. It takes a while. "I couldn't stay there anymore."

"That's fine," says Mark. He wants his son to be successful, of course, but he wants him alive, too. Safe, with his feet firmly on the ground.

He also wants Keith to be happy, though right now happiness might be too much to ask for.

"Besides," Keith says, quietly. "There's something out here. I can feel it."

Mark freezes, a moment, because Rai used to say so too. Say there was something here she was supposed to find. She never did.

"Like what?" he asks.

"Dunno," Keith mumbles into the couch. "But I want to find it."

And Mark is torn, because he doesn't want to lose his son out here, but he knows what it's like to be lost.

"You do what you need t'do, Keith," he says. "Just call your brother, and come home for dinner."

Keith comes home for dinner that night, and at least once every week. He never talks about what he has or hasn't found, but over time his eyes grow brighter and he sits up straighter and Mark knows he'll be okay.

Until the night something bright shoots by overhead, towards the desert, and Mark and Mirana exchange a look and he knows that she knows too: it's no meteor. No matter what the old crackling radio says.

Lance calls in the morning.

"I'm with Keith," he tells them over the sound of wind. "Shiro came back last night."

"The crash," says Mirana. Her hand closes around Mark's.

"Yeah! Keith says we're gonna go find what he's been looking for. But there's something weird going on with the Garrison."

"Be careful," says Mark. "Keep your feet on the ground."

"We will! Love you, Dad! Mom!"

"Me too!" Keith shouts in the background, muffled.

"We love you," says Mirana, and the call drops. As one, straight off, they head for the car.

By the time they reach the shack, their sons are long gone. There's a woman there, though, that Mark recognizes from the TV in the garage waiting room--the wife of the commander of the Kerberos mission. They meet at the porch but no one speaks yet; there's something in the sky. Something fast, and blue.

Mirana grips Mark's elbow hard enough to bruise.

"That ship," she says, and sits slowly in the dusty rocking chair. "That lion... It--it belonged to Alfor."

"Does this look familiar, too?" asks the other woman immediately, holding up a phone. The picture on it is small and dark but there's a ship there that sends Mark's heart to his toes.

"Yes," he says hoarsely. "It looks just look Rai's." He hates to think what that might mean.

The woman looks between the two of them with the same sort of fire as Mirana, for all that she's dressed like every PTA mom Mark's ever met. She puts her hands on her hips.

"Just who are you?" she asks.

"Mark Kogane."

"Mirana Espinosa."

Her face softens at that--maybe, Mark thinks, she knows who must've been aboard that lion. She comes and joins them on the porch, and holds out her hand.

"Nice to meet you, Mark, Mirana," she says, friendlier but no less intense. "I'm Colleen Holt."

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr [here](http://maternalcube.tumblr.com/)
> 
> ps. im corunning [this matt zine](https://vldmattzine.tumblr.com/), check it out!


End file.
